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Originally Posted by Robbie
I was thinking the same thing. Doesn't look like a "dead zone" to me at this point. Just looks like an abandoned town or any little redneck town in the wintertime. I was expecting to see no plants growing and that kind of stuff. Like pics of Hiroshima after the atom bomb.
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I guess there's a couple of points:
Yes, the scattered towns and villages could be pretty much any abandoned midwestern ghost town.
The thing is, the exclusion zone is pretty massive. A few decades have passed. There are no charred trees, no slag run offs (well, outside the powerstation..). It was a nuclear disaster, not a nuclear bomb
The most poignant element in the exclusion zone is the human element. It's odd to see vast tracts of land abandoned, for no 'apparent' reason.
There are still some shops, there's a small military presence, but that's it. The station itself looks like just another building among a bunch.
However, once you get the full gravity of the situation - from the human errors that caused the incident, you can almost imagine hearing the stamping of the control rods as thy danced inside the generator. If you stand on top of the hotel, and imagine seeing the blinding white flash (the only real externally visible sign of the meltdown) as the graphite rods vaporised, or read the history of just how many people lost their lives needlessly.. The first workers on the scene were unprotected, shoveling and handling the slag and debris - they all perished.
Unfortunately, the tour didn't cover any of that stuff. It really was a disappointment. If anyone ends up going, make sure you read up on the history first, look at a map of pripyat, lose the tour and make your own adventure.
As for mutations, there are apparently a lot, especially in the red forest. There are trees that no longer grow up, but out, branches travelling horizontally in an hapless quest for the sun. Giganticism was apparently one of the most common mutations. We saw carp in the river under that rail bridge that were literally as tall and as fat as me.
BTW, Hiroshima is a pretty bumping city. If you didn't know it had been struck with a nuclear bomb, there are no signs really indicating it was.